I bought this used pc from a friend who could not find the drivers for the sound card. It had an exclamation point by the sound in device manager and when I clicked on properties it said the drivers were not loaded. So I took it out and installed a new pci sound blaster card. I had to remove the riser card to install the sound card and then put the riser card back in. I loaded the drivers first before installing the sound card as that is what the directions said to do. Directions said it would be detected on boot. I rebooted and the sound card was still not detected and it was brand new. I have tried everything, cleaning the contacts with alcohol etc but no luck. What else could be the problem besides maybe a bad riser card? It was detecting the old sound card that needed the drivers, but wont detect my new sound card at all.

Assuming the original audio is on-board, it would have been easier to just get the right drivers from Dell--www.support.dell.com--and not install the card. Choose 'drivers and downloads' and then enter your service tag number. If you want to keep the card then you need to go into cmos/bios setup and disable the on-board sound. Save settings and exit. When it reboots and gets to the desktop, open device manager and delete the unknown audio devices. Then hit 'refresh'. That should force the OS to 'refind' the hardware. Hopefully then it'll find the correct drivers.

i bought 4 used dell gx110 pcs with no sound in them. I installed sound cards in all 4. two of them had severe problems getting sound cards to be detected or it detecting them but device manager showing they had a problem (yellow marker) when changing slots used, and not working. By a process of swapping bits round the PCS I established two of the risers must be faulty, I bought 2 more risers on ebay, fitted them and everything was fine. When i got these PCs it looked like nothing had ever been installed in the riser cards at any point in there lives, but two were defintely no good, so i know from experience that you could have a faulty riser card